One alternative to SMTP for email: Confidant Mail

[Mike Ingle]

> Notwithstanding the security compromise from building SMTP gateways,
> some people are pretty attached to their favourite MUA. Have you any
> thoughts about accommodating them by enabling your Confidant Mail
> client or server to function as a local email proxy?


The user interface has to do a lot of things differently from SMTP MUAs 
- display signatures,
check for keys, detect key collisions, display hash IDs, support 
gigabyte attachments...
so it's never going to be a layer under SMTP. The UI can definitely be 
improved to have features
people like from their existing mail clients. It needs automatic filing 
and a preview pane, for example.

At the moment it's a parallel system for when you need security and big 
files. It's as much an
alternative to file drop services as to email. File drops are not 
secure. Confidant Mail sends the
email and attachments in a GPG encrypted ZIP file, which is broken into 
blocks for transmission.

The question I am working on is mobile support. I don't really want to 
carry my GPG key on my
phone, so it might make sense to make a web UI that can run on a PC and 
present itself to a
phone or tablet over a VPN. That way the GPG key stays at home, and if 
the remote user fails
to login a few times, the web UI shuts down.

Confidant Mail can sync itself across multiple clients already, so one 
of those clients could be a
mobile web UI and the other a PC GUI.

Mike